Retiring A-C deputy manager reflects on long career in local government

He thought about it for three years, and befitting the engineer he is, it was the numbers that helped prompt Athens-Clarke County Deputy Manager Bob Snipes to decide to retire, effective next month, after nearly 40 years in government.

Except that he won’t exactly be retiring, at least not for another several months. Snipes, whose career in local government included service as the engineer and director of public works for the old city of Athens, and as director of transportation for the old Clarke County government before he assumed the assistant manager and, then, the deputy manager role in the consolidated Athens-Clarke County government, has been asked by Athens-Clarke County Manager Alan Reddish to come in at least once a week for a time after his official retirement date.

During that time, Snipes will continue to represent the county on the Upper Oconee Basin Water Authority, which oversees the Bear Creek Reservoir, a project serving Athens-Clarke, Oconee, Barrow and Jackson counties that he was instrumental in bringing to reality to help ensure a reliable local water supply.

And, at the request of Athens-Clarke County Mayor Nancy Denson and Oconee County Commission Chairman Melvin Davis, Snipes will oversee the infrastructure improvements needed to accommodate the new Caterpillar equipment manufacturing facility now under construction on a tract of land straddling the two counties.

In a Friday interview in his office, Snipes said he expected the Caterpillar work to continue for maybe a year, after which he and his wife, Linda, a surgical nurse who is also retiring, will take time to enjoy the community that he has, almost literally, helped build during the last few decades.

“I turned 63 in July,” Snipes said. “As I was sitting watching the Olympics, I thought, ‘It’s been 16 years since the Olympics were in Athens, and it seems like a matter of months. If the next 16 years go by that fast, I’ll be in my late 70s ... . When I began to look at the question of what I could make if I retired, and what I could make if I continued to work, I said to my wife, ‘You and I both are working for a few hundred dollars a month, collectively. I asked, ‘Would I give that much money to do what I want to, not go to night meetings and all that, and the answer was, ‘Absolutely.’”

There was also, though, an emotional component to Snipes’ decision. “A friend told me ... you can almost always recover from retiring too soon, but you can never recover from retiring too late,” he said. Then, his voice breaking ever so slightly, Snipes added, “And I’ve seen some of my good friends who worked until their health failed them, and that was a great sadness for me to see that happen.”

In reflecting on his years in local government — he spent his entire career in this community, with the exception of a two-year stint in Tallahassee — Snipes, who grew up in Commerce, talked at some length about the challenges and opportunities of working in a community with active and engaged residents.

“Being a university community, we have people who come here from all over the world,” Snipes said. “They bring their values with them, so there’s less of a homogenous type of value system. It’s more dynamic, and there’s more interface and interaction here ... and that creates a certain kind of work environment that can be enjoyable. ... I think fulfilling the expectations of our population here can be intellectually challenging, it can be professionally challenging — and rewarding.”

Athens-Clarke County, Snipes added, “is large enough that it has a set of issues that professionals enjoy interacting with ... but it’s not so large that those problems are just simply overwhelming.”

Snipes said his role, and the role of the rest of the government’s staff, is to provide elected officials, and through them, the community, with the technical guidance needed to address those issues, whether they be the deeply technical issues associated with, for example, water treatment, or the community-values-related issues associated with questions such as whether a traditional intersection or a roundabout makes sense for traffic control in a given location.

“One of the challenges for a technical person is to be able to communicate those technical issues in terms that the elected officials and the public can quickly grasp, and we ought not to be trying to lose them in technical terminology, and impressing them with how bright we may be,” Snipes said.

Another challenge, Snipes said, is for government staff members to stay out of the political arena occupied by the elected officials they serve. “I know that, sometimes, there might be elected officials who might have been happier if we had used our technical insights to help support a political agenda, but if we ever get to the point that we’re tilting our professional views in one way or the other, I think we tend to diminish our value,” he said. “I’m not here to push a political agenda; I’m here to give you the best technical advice I can.”

And speaking of advice, Snipes responded to a question about the community’s current effort to develop an economic development strategy by saying, “I think we’ve got to change to where we have a more proactive approach. I think that proactive approach is going to have to include a community discussion about the types of economic development we want in this community. There’s got to be an airing of those types of discussions.

“We’ve talked in the past about wanting high-tech kinds of things. Well, what happened when NBAF (the National Bio- and Agro-Defense Facility) was a possibility here? We had public opposition. We ought to have that dialogue before the (economic development) prospect is here, and if that is a type of economic development we want, then let’s say that. And when we have those individuals who might have different views than that — the community’s already spoken.”

And even as he was looking toward his own future outside of local government, Snipes said that part of his job, along with the rest of the government’s staff, is to anticipate what the future might bring to Athens.

“Part of our role, particularly in this office ... is to be able to see over the horizon a little bit, and to help the community meet those challenges that are not so clearly in view,” he said. “If we’re hearing about a problem that is common walking-around knowledge in the community, then we’ve probably failed — and I’m speaking for staff and elected officials. Our role is to see those things before they emerge and become predominant problems, and to the extent that the public doesn’t have to worry about those sorts of things, then I think we’ve done our jobs.”